Ex-President Carter fills in for Rosalynn

Tuesday

Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife of 69 years, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, have been to 146 countries at last count.

Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife of 69 years, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, have been to 146 countries at last count.

And everywhere they go, “I guarantee you the main thing she wants to talk about is mental health,” the peanut farmer-turned-world leader told a packed auditorium at the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts Tuesday night.

And when the Steel Magnolia fell ill following a 16-hour flight back from Dubai, the 39th president took her place in Gainesville on Tuesday to deliver the message she had written to the mental health workers and students who had come to hear her speak.

The event was organized by the Accent Speakers Bureau and co-sponsored by the Bob Graham Center for Public Service and the Gainesville Opportunity Center. When he gave a shoutout to the Opportunity Center, the audience cheered.

“I know all of you are disappointed my wife could not be here,” Carter said, adding that he was excited to have a chance to talk about her work. “Rosalynn has been working on mental health issues for 44 years.”

Her interest started when he was governor of Georgia, and blossomed when he became president, Carter said. He appointed her to lead a committee on mental health, which eventually led to the creation and passage of the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980.

“Almost all the (mental health) initiatives I started as president have been put into effect,” Carter said.

Two years after they left the White House, the Carters founded the Carter Center, where Rosalynn created and chaired the Mental Health Task Force.

Her number one mission became eliminating the stigma associated with mental illness. She and Jimmy traveled to Hollywood and New York to talk to screenwriters to discuss how to accurately portray people with mental illness. She offers fellowships to journalists from around the world to train them on mental health issues.

“I put a lot of blame on stigma, and dream of a day when stigma is gone,” Carter read from a statement from Rosalynn that she had prepared for her speech at UF.

He said they both consider mental illness to be the nation’s largest hidden epidemic and major public health issue. The decades of funding cuts for mental health have taken their toll, he said, leading to abuse and derogatory treatment of those with mental illness.

Carter said he is optimistic that the Affordable Care Act, if the Supreme Court rules favorably and Congress doesn’t repeal it, will offer the financial means for people to access mental health care and get the treatment they need to lead successful lives.

And he said the country has made great progress in no longer warehousing people with mental illness.

“When I was a child, I had two cousins with serious mental illness,” he said. One was at the infamous Georgia state home for the mentally ill in Milledgeville, the other in Augusta. “I never saw them except on holidays.”

Reading from Rosalynn’s book, “Within Our Reach: Ending the Mental Health Crisis,” Carter said the key to success lay in early diagnosis, detection and treatment.

“I look forward to the day every mother takes her child to a well-being checkup for mental illness,” he read.

Quoting from her book, Carter said the way we treat people with mental illness in this country is a moral issue. “To treat them as second-class citizens runs counter to our values.”

Mental health should be treated as a basic human right, he said. People with mental illness should be treated the same as those who are physically ill, he said.

Following his 30-minute speech, Carter took questions that had been tweeted by the audience and read aloud by Nancy Hardt, a professor and Director for Health Disparities in the UF College of Medicine.

Carter said the best thing students can do is to learn the basics of mental illness. “Read Rosalynn’s book. She wrote it for peanut farmers.”

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